Stunning New Map Could Help Unravel The Mysteries Of The Brain

Scientists at Seattle's Allen Institute
for Brain Science have completed the first comprehensive
map of a mammalian brain, marking an important step in the quest
to understand still-mysterious brain diseases like autism,
Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.

While plenty of diseases are difficult to treat, brain diseases
often stymie the medical community completely because they are
challenging to even understand. In part, that's because
the human brain — which
has an estimated 86 billion neurons — is densely packed
and intricately connected, making it almost mind-numbingly
complex.

A map showing the connections that run all throughout the brain
had only been completed before in a tiny, primitive roundworm
with about 302 neurons. A mouse has 71 million.

The publicly available map documents all of the cellular
connections in a healthy mouse brain. This foundation will allow
researchers to examine what is different in a diseased brain, and
to begin to develop animal models of brain diseases — an
important tool for medical research.

"It has been hypothesized that connectivity changes may be one of
the major underlying causes of diseases" like autism, Alzheimer's
and Parkinson's, Hongkhui Zeng of the Allen Institute told
Business Insider. "Once we know where [those changes] are, we can
think about how to treat them."